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Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

I have a strong feeling a large amount of “long covid” may be the collective anxiety and stress combined with a reduction in social interaction

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It's not. The most common mix of symptoms track closely timing wise post covid onset and do not overlap in general with anxiety and stress symptoms. For example chills, exercise intolerance, difficulty breathing after eating, visual snow, tinnitus.

Im not saying long covid doesn’t exist. Only that it is going to be really fun to figure out what it is when a lot of people think they have it.

All of those symptoms seem like they could be stress induced to me at any rate. If you find any reviewed studies let me know.

Personally I find it odd how confidently you are in your assumptions in an area you state you are uninformed about. It's harmful to perpetuate the perception that long covid sufferers are simply stressed out.

Also exercise intolerance is definitely not a stress symptom, exercise is often recommended as remedy for stress. Yet this is one of the most common long covid symptoms.

Anytime there is a new disorder it is completely neglected in science as long as possible despite real suffers being denied real treatment and acknowledgement for a very long time.

Thing is, there are lots of things that are completely neglected by science and only some of them are new disorders.

I feel that my skepticism of much of the COVID hysteria, whether actually well-founded or not, helped me avoid a lot of this anxiety and stress over the past couple of years.

I took advantage of a nearly 2-year paid "work from home" vacation, and did a lot of other things I probably would not have done otherwise, including joining a gym and getting myself in shape for the first time in my life, and making some new friends.

It can’t have been good for people who are already anxiety-prone or otherwise have mental health issues to be subjected to two years of “going outside will kill everyone you love”.

There's also a strong correlation between the demographics of those who tend to have higher rates of mental illness and those who tend to suffer more from long covid.

Can you point out where I can this data point in the article? I must have missed it.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/980527

“ In an analysis of almost 55,000 adult participants in three ongoing studies, having depression, anxiety, worry, perceived stress, or loneliness early in the pandemic, before SARS-CoV-2 infection, was associated with a 50% increased risk for developing long COVID”

According to this article, rates of depression during COVID outbreak, were 27.5%. So, at least a decent chance this happens by chance? Also they mention worry, perceived stress and loneliness. Did anyone not perceive stress during the pandemic? 50% seems like a pretty low correlation. I can’t read your article because it’s login walled.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/depression-rates-tripled-wh...

No, it was 50% off those that experienced that BEFORE covid - so it was controlled

Right but 50% of people who had long COVID had experienced “worry, perceived stress, or loneliness” in the past ( not ti mention depression/anxiety) I’d expect that number to be much higher.

> Right but 50% of people who had long COVID had experienced

Read more carefully that isn't what the paper showed - it showed that those with previous psychological problems were 50% more likely to have long covid COMPARED to those that didn't have previous problems

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